Salah Fareeq Al-Feroun and his family have been farmers in southern Iraq for generations. 

In the living room of his house in al-Meshkhab in Najaf Province, his son Muhammad Ziyad takes out a photo of their 32-acre farm — located about five miles away from their home — which shows lush green grass as far as the eye can see, soaked in water.

But their farm doesn’t look like that anymore. It’s now barren and dry, with no one able to work the land anymore.

Severe water shortages in Iraq have been affecting the cultivation of the country’s signature anbar rice — Al-Feroun’s main crop. The water has been drying up because of a combination of climate change and geopolitics.

“[There’s] no rice, no vegetables, [nothing],” Al-Feroun said. “There [aren’t any plants], only wheat. This is the main river — dry.”

Al-Feroun used to grow rice in the summer and wheat in the winter. Now he can only grow wheat. Because of the water shortages, he can no longer grow anbar rice, a long-grain white rice with a high fat ratio that is unique to Iraq, and which is traditionally served with every meal. The word anbar — sometimes also written as amber in English — is an Arabic word that refers to the rice’s perfume-like fragrance.

“Amber rice is very significant for its smell and it also [has a] very delicious taste,” al-Feroun said through a translator.

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For the past two years, though, the Iraqi government has banned farmers from cultivating the rice because it is a water-intensive crop. The paddy where the rice grows has to be fully submerged in water and takes around five months to mature. The government has only allowed for minimal farming of the crop in certain areas to preserve the seeds for future cultivation.

Importing rice

This has forced Iraqis to import rice from other countries, including Iran, Pakistan and India. The imported rice has a different taste than anbar.

“There used to be five types of anbar rice, but now there are only two,” explained Ahmed Salim, the manager of a store at Al-Warda Market in central Baghdad, as he poured out some rice into packets for weighing. “And the prices have more than doubled. We depend on Pakistani rice — Basmati.”

‘The Cradle of Civilization’

For centuries, Iraqis have relied on water from two main rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates.

They are what gave Iraq — or ancient Mesopotamia — the titles “The Cradle of Civilization” and “The Land Between Two Rivers.”

But that land is drying up.

Achref Chibani, who is a climate journalist, says that climate change is one factor and that it has a snowball effect.

This past summer, temperatures in Iraq reached nearly 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the country has experienced years of persistent drought.

Extreme heat has also devastated crops in neighboring Turkey, which is where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers begin. 

There are water-sharing agreements among the countries that surround these rivers: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Chibani says that the effects of climate change are exacerbated by poor governance and regional politics.

“The impact of climate change will make geopolitics more obvious in the near future because close coordination will not be an option, it will be ma